This Paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk-averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. Optimal employment contracts offer severance compensation to smooth...

The central objective of this paper is to assess the empirical relevance of labour adjustment costs arising from institutional rigidities and to compare their importance across countries. It thus develops a simple dynamic bargaining model of the union monopoly type that, for the first time,...

The model developed in this paper examines the relationship between firing costs and unemployment in a simple two-period model with uncertainty. Where there are long-term employment relationships, and where risk-averse workers and risk-neutral firms bargain over wages and firing costs, average...

We use a panel of manufacturing plants from Colombia to analyse how the rise in payroll tax rates over the 1980s and 1990s affected the labour market. Our estimates indicate that formal wages fall by between 1.4% and 2.3% as a result of a 10% rise in payroll taxes. This...

The paper presents a stochastic insider-outsider model that accounts for the following stylized facts: (1) unemployment rates display a high degree of serial correlation, or `persistence'; (2) the average rate of unemployment has been higher in the United States than in Europe over the 1950s and...

This paper provides strategic foundations for the insight that the bargaining power of employees depends on the firm’s labour turnover costs. The analysis shows how these costs determine the firm’s degree of substitutability between two sets of wage negotiations: (i) those the firm conducts...

This paper explores the implications of giving unemployed people -- particularly the long-term unemployed -- the opportunity to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. The vouchers would depend positively on unemployment duration and...

The paper analyses complementarities among a variety of labour market policies. It shows: (a) that a wide range of labour market institutions (e.g. unemployment benefits, job security legislation and payroll taxes) have complementary effects on unemployment; and thus (b) that policies aimed at...

This paper develops a simple model of employment, non-statutory redundancy pay and wage determination. An interesting feature of this model is that the contract curve is vertical. Some of the predictions of the model are confronted with the available British data on non-statutory firing costs,...

This paper discusses how employment vouchers should depend on age in a simple overlapping generations model in which workers are either young or old. We find that young workers should receive higher vouchers as displacement of the old rises and as the deadweight loss from providing vouchers to...